Monday Mailbox

I have been incredibly spoiled this past week by the absolute April shower of books arriving practically daily around here. That's a sure sign that one of my annual commitments reading-wis is ramping up again. Here's hoping I can keep up with the stream of books! Or at least have them read by the time they should be read. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Last River Child by Lori Ann Bloomfield came from the author via the publisher.
About a girl whose appearance causes her to have to fight superstitions her whole life until WWI alters the people in her small town forever, this one sounds really cool.

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda came from the publisher.
An adoption story across two countries, America and India, I can't wait to dive into this one.

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville came from Valerie at Hachette.
I have my own cradle story from when I was pregnant with my first child so the story of a woman who wants her husband to find her baby cradle resonates quite deeply with me.

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs by Heather Lende came from the publisher.
I have her first memoir about living in Alaska and this follow-up looks delightful as well.

Easy as Pi by Jamie Buchan came from Julie at FSB Associates.
I was all set to run screaming from this one but I have been assured that it is fascinating even to the number averse because it explains the sources of numerical phrases.

A Certain "Je Ne Sais Quoi" by Chloe Rhodes came from Julie at FSB Associates.
I love word and phrase origins so I am looking forward to this one a lot.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Marcia at The Printed Page and enjoy seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Review: Nana by Emile Zola

After I finished school, diploma clutched tightly in my hot little hand, I realized that degree notwithstanding, I had some holes in my education through which a careful driver could manuever a truck. Reading snob that I was at the time, I decided that I needed to remedy the situation and live up to my newly minted certification as well read. So I popped out to the local bookstore and snatched up some of the classics we never covered in school. Zola was one of those authors and Nana was the title of his that most appealed to me so home it followed me, whereupon it languished on my shelves unread for something approaching (exceeding?--I don't have record of the date I bought it and my records start in 2002) ten years. Was it because I thought it would be inaccesible? Was it because I shelve alphabetically and so it was at the bottom in a corner? Perhaps it was because subconsciously I knew that it wasn't going to be a very happy reading experience for me. If the last reason is true, sadly, it was prophetic. Before I pulled the book off the shelf and paid for it, I should have read the back cover copy and remembered how very desperately I loathed the Naturalist writers I had read. I could have saved myself a lot of reading anguish this past week.

Nana is the story of an actress who rises up from the gutters of Paris and takes the town by storm, collecting men and their money as she ascends. She is an avaricious creature, not only demanding money from her protectors but also prostituting herself whenever she cannot extort enough money from the seriously ridiculous rich men with whom she surrounds herself. But she doesn't start out quite so greedy. At the start of the story, she is just coming into her own and she is naive in the ways of manipulation. Through her clever maid's offices and the advice of certain hangers-on, she learns to exploit not only her sexuality but the strange magnetism she exudes over men. She is an Eve of the worst sort, shallow and selfish, unconcerned with the destruction of others.

Because this is a novel in the naturalist tradition, it uses very detailed realism and suggests that heredity and social origins determine a person's personality. This tips the reader off to the fact that Nana is not a heroine to strive to emulate. Rather she is a product of the lower classes and must needs be a lesser person as a result, most likely one who will come to a likely end no matter how high she manages to rise as a courtesan. As annoying as this prefiguring based on literary convention made reading, the novel was tiresome for more than just that. Zola takes fully half the novel to develop his character of Nana, drawing her as both stupid (she is a woman, after all) and cunning (ditto). He spends many pages throughout the novel in overly detailed descriptions of rooms, people, clothing, plays, etc. Despite his florid descriptions of the physical settings, Zola manages to make the male characters who flock to Nana like moths to a flame almost entirely interchangeable and indistinct. And so very few of the characters besides Nana achieve any sort of clarity in the mind of the reader. It's hard to read a novel where there is an unpleasant main character and few, if any, distractions from them.

Wasteful, bored, and dissolute characters abound in this ultimately pessimistic, doom-laden offering. It is a classic of French literature, and I suppose that I can be content with myself that another hole in the education has been plugged, but it was a dismal, dreary, and dull reading experience that I can't recommend. Others have offered accolades though so check out differing opinions on the novel before you dismiss it. But if you do choose to ignore my warnings and read it, don't blame me (unless you are an insomniac looking for a sleep aid). Not surprisingly, this will be my only experience with Zola.

I read Nana for the Classics Circuit's tour of Zola although I struggled so much that I missed my official tour date and am only squeaking this review in under the wire in order to be considered a participant at all.

Hygiene

Because we are not a normal family, tonight at dinner the conversation turned to arm pits. T. announced that his are bald and waved his arms in the air so we could all see. (Did I mention that dinner tonight was at a restaurant?) R. checked hers to make certain she was clean shaven and then made a comment about T. being stinky despite his having had a shower earlier after his tennis match. I suggested that perhaps a more liberal use of soap was needed. W. looked at me quizzically and said, "You use soap on your pits? I always use shampoo because they're hairy." Poor D. now knows why his shampoo gets run through so quickly!

(comic from hedrondude's Another Reality 6 series)

Saturday Shout-Out

On my travels through the blogging world, I find many books that pique my interest. I always add them to my wish list immediately but I tend to forget who deserves the blame credit for inspiring me to add them to my list (and to whom my husband would like to send the bill when I get around to actually buying them). So each Saturday I'm going to try and keep better track, link to my fellow book ferreter-outers (I know, not a word but useful nonetheless), and hopefully add to some of your wish lists too.

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman was mentioned on Breaking the Spine.

Writing Jane Austen by Elizabeth Aston was mentioned on Austenprose.

A Lost Wife's Tale by Marion McGilvary was mentioned on Book End Babes.

Cool Water by Dianne Warren was mentioned on Caribousmom.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey was mentioned on Algonquin Books Blog.


What goodies have you added to your wish lists recently? Make your own list and leave a comment here so we can all see who has been a terrible influence inspiring you lately.

Spring Break Travelogue

We are very lucky to have family living in a place that is very appealing to visit for spring break and so once again, we packed ourselves up and headed to Savannah. Living in the south as we do now also means that there's not an entire day's worth of driving ahead of us and so we can take our time packing and starting out. That bit us in the butt this year though. The kids had no decent shoes to wear for church on Easter and so I hung around long enough to hit the only store in town that carries shoes the width of shoe boxes themselves for my Fred Flintstone-like, wide-footed children. And we managed to choose pretty quickly (not a hard task when your appropriate size choices are A or B and sometimes only A).

No matter how quickly you do the last minute errands, though, my newest travel advice is to never try to leave town when the President is visiting. It's a guarantee that every road in the city will be beyond bollocksed up. And if you're really lucky like we were, the highway will come to a complete and total stop a mere mile from the exit you need. 45 minutes stuck on the highway is never any fun. On the other hand, it was sort of entertaining to see the cops picking up and ticketing folks crossing the median to turn around and escape the highway closure. That's one way to increase the city's badly needed revenues, I guess. God bless government. :-P

Once we finally escaped the long, circular parking lot so incapacitated by the POTUS's visit, we ran headlong into 3 fairly impressive accidents on 95. I swear that particular highway is an accident magnet. Despite the fact that my GPS promised me a 3:03pm arrival in Savannah, we rolled in at 4:45 as I was starting to come down with something nasty. Normally being late wouldn't be an issue but we had a music festival concert to go to that night with my parents. D. was unaffected by my late arrival because he had driven down earlier on his own (he also didn't experience the seventh circle of traffic hell, the lucky b@stard), but I had to pull off a presentable quick change in 10 minutes after 5+ hours in the car. By the time we left my parents' house, I could barely breathe and my throat was impossibly sore but I was dressed pretty, dad gum it.

Coughing and hacking and sneezing during all silent portions of the evening added to everyone's enjoyment of the music, I'm sure. The evening was a jazz thing that showcased the top three high school bands from the morning's competition and many of the professionals who had judged the groups. Kids behind us had played that morning but were not playing that evening and clearly knew their stuff. One kid was amazed during a sax solo. The saxophonist was playing something multi-tonal. Apparently this should be incredibly impressive. Quite honestly, it sounded like crap to me. Then again, I was listening as if underwater I was so stuffed up and I'm completely non-musical at the best of times so... Although I may have been congested from my eyeballs to my toes, I still heard the reedy whifflings by that same saxophonist and I know that those can't be good no matter that he can pull of the discordant to me multi-tonal thing. Lest you think I can only be grouchy and snarky when I am sick (99% true, incidentally), I will say that Amazing Grace played by Wycliffe Gordon, Marcus Printup, and Marcus Roberts was absolutely the most awe inspiring piece of music I've ever heard in my life. The minute they finished, the whole audience was on its feet. And the concert should really have ended on that note. Unfortunately for my highly contagious and plague-y self, it didn't.

The next night, rather than being smart and babying my sick self, D. and I went to more music from the festival. This time it was bluegrass. We parked the car and as we headed out of the parking garage, I walked right off edge of sidewalk and fell flat. Good thing I refuse to be ladylike and wear nylons because I scraped the snot out of my knees. More importantly, I looked like an idiot. Lesson learned: nevermind operating heavy machinery when under the influence of heavy duty drugs, don't even try to walk unaided. (And I'll pretend I wasn't the one who drove us downtown that night too.) Sitting in the chairs in the auditorum made the plague hit again full force so I once again accompanied the musicians with my very own nose trumpet. Catering to my misery, we left at half time (or intermission for those of you who are not my sports-minded husband or father).

The major reason we had pushed to get to Savannah when we did was to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday (and my nephew's 1st). Not wanting to cause E. a heart attack, we told her we were having a surprise party for her. The beauty of some memory loss: by the time people started walking in, it was a pleasant surprise to her again. My sister S. and I got a kick out of the birthday cake as my mother had asked for chocolate roses. They looked just like cow patties on the cake. Good thing the kids don't care how appetizing cake looks as long as it is chock full of sugar and butter. After food, we trooped downstairs for a puppet show that my mom had won in a charity auction. Normally the puppet show travels to schools and presents to kids about music (see the theme from the weekend?). They didn't alter the show at all and so it was one of those mind numbingly dull educational shows that kids welcome at school if only to get out of class for a few precious minutes (and I was one of the kids in school with a *good* attitude!). I think the old folks enjoyed it though. Mom had discovered that the retirement home wouldn't charge her for the room if she opened the show to all residents so we had the whole gamut of oldsters there. We are nothing if not cheap and resourceful in our family. ;-) Personally I think borrowing somebody's cane and thwacking the puppets over the heads would have livened the whole thing up, but no one else seemed to have the attention span of a gnat during the show. Maybe I was still just sick and crabby (entirely possible) or maybe I'm correct about the mind-numbing (I prefer this option).

After all the birthday festivities and Easter egg hunting and whatnot was all through, we settled down to stay for another week, especially since my dad was having an operation. You'd think this would mean that we would be nice to him. Au contraire. I told a few people he was having cosmetic surgery (you're welcome dad) and chewed him out for being a lousy patient. I think I'm probably officially out of the will now. Maybe my sister had the right idea, leaving before he went under the knife! My kids are likely out of the will too as they had one of their favorite conversations about who in the family has hair. (Why this fascinates them, even at their advanced ages, I don't know but the boys should watch out because they too will sport chrome domes one day unless the hospital switched them at birth with some less follically challenged family's kids.) Anyway, T. said my dad didn't have hair. My mom protested that he did. W. agreed: "On his back." Yup. You're welcome S., you and your kids will be inheriting everything!

Since dad was out of commission, I went to a fancy party with my mom. We toured the house in which the party was held and I spent most of my time looking at the bookshelves instead of the artwork that was supposed to be being highlighted. The folks that owned the house had kids about 10 years younger than I am. How do I know this? The kids' book originals they had saved for their grandchildren were just past my time. My mother who is used to my weirdness about books and bookshelf snooping, laughingly reported this to the lady of the house, who appeared to think I was mildly boring as a result. She got us back later by making us look at her daughter's high school graduation album though so we were officially even as that made me think she was also mildly boring. No wonder the bookishly socially backward (me) don't get invited to these kinds of shindigs very often--not to mention that we (also me) are most likely to dress in black pants and a white blouse, making us (still me) virtually indistinguishable from the wait-staff.

Most of the rest of the spring break we just hung around the house making sure someone was around to harass daddy into getting out of bed and walking around like he was supposed to be doing. The kids said he looked like an oompa-loompa with his goofy post-op bonnet on. I think he looked like he'd lost a fist fight with a shovel. When not endearing myself to the cantankerous patient, I sat around and read. The kids finally begged to do something so we drove out to Tybee Island the day before we left. In all the years we've been visiting my parents, we've gone out to Tybee a grand total of twice. The traffic has something to do with it (it's ugly) but my dislike of sand is also a factor. We circled looking for parking for quite some time and finally found a spot for less than $20. There was even time left on the meter. (Remember the resourceful and cheap thing in my DNA?) So I added my few quarters and told the kids we had an hour with which to play. It was windy and chilly on the beach. The kids went in the water while I sat wishing for a down blanket. Does this make me a real southerner now? Shaking my head at the crazy Yankees who were apparently unaware it was too cold to be sitting there in a bathing suit? Actually shivering occasionally? OK, probably not, but I think I'm getting there. The current kept pulling the kids way down the beach so I was very grateful when our hour was up and we headed back to the car, sandy and with a stinky shell collection.

The next day we packed everything up and braved the journey home. 95 proved to have several delays again as we rubber-necked past some more impressive accidents. But at least the President was off tying up traffic in some other city by the time we got back. Since we've been home so long, the laundry is finished and put away and one of these days I'll work up the motivation to take down the Easter decorations too. It may take until the Fourth of July decorations have to go up, but I'm workin' on it. Oh, and as for my dad and his recovery, he had to have the surgery again on one eye since only one healed like it should have. Bet he was spectacularly pleasant after cosmetic surgery take two. ;-) (OK, it wasn't really cosmetic, it was necessary but he got the equivalent of a face lift out of it so I can give him grief--plus he bequeathed me the same condition so watching him is just watching my future and if I can't laugh at myself...).

Review: The Gravedigger's Cottage by Chris Lynch

The McLuckies, dad, Sylvia, and Walter, have moved to a new town for a new start hoping to leave their bad luck and overarching sadness behind them. But they've moved into the locally known Gravedigger's Cottage, ironic given their frequent losses to death: Sylvia's mother, half brother Walter's mother, and a veritable plethora of pets. The McLuckies are mostly self-contained, sheltering with each other away from the rest of the world, until Walter welcomes an odd local child into their midst as his friend. It is the advent of the outside into thier home that highlights just how thin the thread that holds them is. The story is told by fourteen year old Sylvia and is fairly unrelentingly dark. The chapters alternate between the disintegrating psychological state of Mr. McLuckie accompanied by the distress of the kids and brief vignettes about each pet they've had and how it eventually, generally accidentally, met its death. There is a creepiness and morbidity to the book that is unrelieved by the easy and redemptive ending because it is too abrupt to banish the feel of the book up to that point.

Although this is a young adult book so I am not the target audience anyway, I found it very difficult to immerse myself in the story and more bothered than anything else by the characterizations. It was hard to be sympathetic towards any of the characters. It just felt off-kilter most of the time. Perhaps the middle school audience for whom I was pre-screening it will be more receptive to it than I was.

Review: Charming the Highlander by Janet Chapman

Grace Sutter's unmarried sister was returning to her boyfriend from Grace's house when she was in a terrible car accident. After the accident and giving birth prematurely to her tiny son, she succumbs to her injuries but not before extracting Grace's promise to return the baby to his father, the man Mary had fled before he knew she was pregnant. Grace puts her career as a rocket scientist in jeopardy to do just that despite her misgivings. And then the plane taking her back to the tiny and remote Maine village where she and her siblings grew up crashes on a mountainside. Grace and Baby survive because of the help of Greylen MacKeage.

Unbeknownst to Grace, or anyone else in the village, Greylen and his brothers are medieval Scottish warriors who have been tossed unceremoniously into the twenty-first century by a wizard eager to find and train his heir. Since Greylen is to father the babe with a modern woman, he has been brought foward in time although Greylen himself remains in ignorance of the reason. He feels an immediate connection to Grace and she to him, even before the crash. But the baby Grace claims is hers (what's a lie or two amongst destined lovers?) and with whom she is traveling will test their destined love. Baby is Mary Sutton's son by Greylen's sworn enemy Michael MacBain and she had initally fled Michael when he told her of the storm that transported him from the 1100's to present day. This fact is something that Greylen had never intended to share with anyone and that Grace thinks Michael is possibly insane because of his tale doesn't help matters. And while Greylen might admire Grace's spunk, intelligence, and drive, when she asks him to put aside his enmity to help out MacBain in return for her helping him, he is torn.

The tension between the main characters is pretty electric and although it is of the immediate, at first sight variety, the hardships that Grace and Greylen suffer together, bonding them closely, help to alleviate some of the skepticism that normally accompanies the love at first sight thing for me. I'm not a huge fan of time travel but it isn't overplayed here. I was disappointed in the dramatic, and somewhat nonsensical denouement as a result of Grace's highly charged job and the corporate secrets with which she and she alone seems to understand. That bit strained credulity even more than the time travel plot line. But overall, most romance readers who like a good Scottish warrior and fantasize about one living in the present day will appreciate this light and quick read.